Rhode Island - Day 14 - cousins

Fishermen's Memorial State Campground, Narragansett
Sunday, 14 October 2018

today's route

The sunrise this morning was absolutely spectacular - one of those gorgeous moments Nature sometimes surprises us with.  It started soon after I set out for the first walk with the dogs and was nearly done by the time I got back to my camera.  I couldn't have done justice anyway with a photo, because I don't know how to make the camera take panoramic shots.  But it will live on for a while in my memory.

I've learned that, oddly, neither Rhode Island nor Connecticut has a town named Randolph.  The first states I've encountered so far that don't.

It's getting pretty chilly at night these days, and I'm nearly out of propane, which is what my heater uses.  The last few times I've gotten it at a Tractor Supply shop, and I found one online just down Post Road (Rt. 1) in North Kingstown.  I waited until 9:00, when I was sure they'd be open, and went on down the road.  Of course, it turned out to be the only Tractor Supply that didn't sell propane.  They recommended I try a place a little farther down the road, and gave me directions for how to find it.

It turned out to be an equipment rental shop that was closed closed closed on Sunday.  But they had a large propane tank to the side, so I planned to come back first thing tomorrow.

Then I went back to Warwick to find the home of my cousin Trish, Marian's daughter.  Between her directions and online maps, I found it fairly easily and much too early for her to be there, so we continued down the road to find someplace where I could walk the dogs.

Nice old residential neighborhood and after a bit I found a large parking lot that didn't have any signs and was less than half full, so I stopped at the back out of the way and the dogs and I went on a tour.  We were halfway around when I realized the lot belonged to the Catholic church across the street, but because there was so much unused space I didn't think they'd mind.  At times like these, I think it helps for me to be a white, middle-aged female - not threatening to anybody at all and able to blend in most places.

We walked around a couple of times and ate some lunch and after a while drove back down the street to meet my cousins.

Trish lives on the 3rd floor of an old Victorian house - what used to be the servants' quarters - and accessed by several flights of steep stairs.  Trish got back from picking up Marian about the same time I got there, and I wasn't at all sure how Marian was going to get up those stairs, given her age (in her 80s) and her using a cane.  But these Yankee women are nothing if not tough and she got up those stairs with about as much ease as I did.

Trish had wanted to give me a bunch of genealogical information about my piece of her family, but her internet connection got spotty for some reason, and she had a deadline to get to some big ceremony they were having down the street at the Pawtuxet Rangers armory.  Trish and her boyfriend got all dressed up in Revolutionary period garb while Marian and I visited, and then she tried again on the internet connection, with no luck.

I begged out of going to the ceremony because the afternoon was moving on and I was moving into a new campground and wanted to get there with plenty of time before dark (sunset is around 6:00 these days).

Turned out to be a good thing I left when I did.  I stopped to buy a few groceries and walked the dogs around the grocery store parking lot, and we didn't get to the campground until 4:00. 

These people wanted not only proof of rabies vaccinations, and proof of my identity, but also proof of vehicle registration, and weren't going to let me in without it.  What's that about?  They were insisting on knowing whether the license plates had expired.  Huh?  I found the title, which wasn't good enough (they didn't want proof of ownership), and they finally just decided the license plate itself was good enough since the title had the license plate number on it too.  Or something.  Later I found the registration but what an oddball thing to be insisting on.

This is the only state campground that both allows dogs and has utility plug-ins, and it's the first state campground I've been in since New York.  The other New England state campgrounds don't have plug-ins, and I couldn't see why I should pay money to stay in the same kind of facilities I could get for free in a hotel parking lot or something.

Well, this is a nice campground, very close to the ocean out at the end of the Narragansett peninsula, less than 2 miles from Point Judith.  But I'm not looking forward to the night at all because the temp is forecast to be in the 30s and I'm so out of propane I'm not sure I'll even have enough to make coffee with in the morning.  I can keep me warm with blankets and Gracie's got a thick coat but Dexter rejects blankets and then curls up in a little ball to keep warm.  But there's nothing I can do about it until tomorrow.